


It's the Great Mushroom, Paul Stamets

by strangeallure



Series: It's the Great Mushroom, Charlie Brown [1]
Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Halloween Challenge, Long Live Feedback Comment Project, M/M, mycelial shenanigans, scary stuff, some humor too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-07-23 15:13:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16161476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangeallure/pseuds/strangeallure
Summary: Canon-divergent from the end of 1x13 "What's Past Is Prologue".When Paul tries to navigate the Discovery back to its own universe, they get stuck in a mycelial network still battling the effects of Terran contamination. It's going to be an uphill battle, but the prospect of getting the crew home - and maybe even bringing Hugh back with them - keeps him going.





	It's the Great Mushroom, Paul Stamets

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to challenge myself to write every day this October, so this is going to be a collection of loosely connected short stories, linked by the conceit introduced in this story.

“The pathways are bifurcating too quickly,” Paul hears himself say, too much tension in his voice.

_The pathways are bifurcating too quickly._

_Bifurcating._

_Too quickly._

The words ricochet in his mind, farther and farther away, echoing across an impossible distance between the Paul who said them and the one who thought them. He’s rushing through the mycelial network, too fast to see or feel or comprehend, let alone navigate.

“I don’t know where to go,” his voice is small, barely audible to himself over the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of mycelial nodes passing by, taking root in the fertile ground of the universe and spreading out into infinite realities.

There is no way to plot a course, no way to get home, to bring his crew to safety. His body aches as does his mind, and he loses his sense of direction and of self, gets swept up in the tendrils sprouting all around him, explosions of webbed light intermingling with a demanding, hungry nothingness he doesn’t remember from previous jumps.

It’s not dark like the soil, like the universe before the big bang, like creation. It’s the antithesis of growth and nurture and color. The antagonist of becoming.

And Paul has seen it before. When he was trapped with his Terran counterpart. When Hugh had made him go back to save the network. It’s the Terran corruption spreading through the mycelium, wreaking havoc where Discovery’s gambit should have induced healing, tearing through the fabric of everything. 

He feels something constricting, the essence of himself being strangled by this destructive force, leaving a cold and hopeless terror under this strange chokehold. He can’t die like this, he can’t let his crew die like this. There has been too much death already. Too many lives lost. Good people, irreplaceable people.

A warm feeling, like a hand across his chest, takes some of the terror away, a small bubble of calm in the maelstrom of becoming and decay all around him.

The feeling gives itself a voice: “The network is a gift.”

It’s Hugh. Impossibly, inexplicably, undeniably Hugh.

“I couldn’t stop the contamination, Hugh,” he says, eyes imploring, his mouth crowding with everything he would rather say. “It’s dying,” his chest clenches, “I can’t…”

“Shhh.” Even in this impossible situation, Hugh’s a soothing presence, his quiet strength anchoring Paul’s wildly pulsing mind.

“We don’t have much time,” Hugh says and Paul can feel the small yet resolute smile in those words. 

“It’s not dying, Paul, it’s fighting this infection,” Hugh explains with that unflappable authority that makes him so good with patients. “The network is fighting for its life, for all our lives.”

On some level Paul knows that this is all in his head, his mind, that there is no physical reality corresponding to this experience, and yet the way Hugh squeezes his hand, reassurance, affection, trust, all seeping into him, feels more real than anything else.

“Right now it’s bad,” Hugh’s eyes are large and warm like always, compassionate,” It’s delirious, lashing out, and you and the crew will have to ride it out until the fever breaks. It might not feel like it, but I know you can do it.” This unshakeable believe in his abilities, Paul knows that, too. “You can do it. And you can bring me back with you.”

Something like a kiss, or maybe a discharge of energy, a prickling sensation, ghosts over Paul’s lips.

He doesn’t understand, doesn’t know what Hugh means. There are so many questions, but before he can ask even one, it’s like he’s pushed forward and pulled back by a harness. His whole body feels like an old-fashioned rag doll flung across space and time, and he wonders distantly about whiplash and internal bleeding when he loses consciousness.

\--

“Keep whipping, Paul, keep whipping,” is the first thing he hears when he comes to.

He’s never woken up like this before, his mind dazed but his body wide awake, holding onto a heavy bowl in his arm, doing as he’s told and whipping the contents with a wooden implement. Judging from the strain in his arm, he’s been at it for a while.

He blinks and the cloud of red curls next to him reminds him of something, of someone. He knows that voice, too.

“Why are you calling me by my first name, cadet?”

Sylvia Tilly breaks out into a grin. “Oh my, thank heavens you’re back!” she exclaims. “I was so worried.” She fidgets, but doesn’t let up from chopping blackish blue roots sitting in front of her. “I mean: sir. I was so worried, _sir_. Good to have you back, Lieutenant Commander Stamets.”

“Back where?” He’s disoriented, still can’t see much farther than her face.

“Oh, you don’t know.” Her expression dims. “Well, I guess you wouldn’t.” She nods vigorously, visibly pulling herself together. “Of course you wouldn’t.”

Her hands brush down from her hips to her legs and Paul notices that she wears some kind of half-covering over her uniform. An apron, he thinks. He hasn’t seen one of those in a long while. 

“So, first off all, keep whipping until the mixture turns green,” Tilly instructs him, “then tell me immediately so I can add the root.”

Nothing makes sense here, and Paul thinks he might be going crazy, but there’s this feeling deep within that tells him he’d better do as he’s told, so he keeps whipping the slimy, puss-like fluid in his bowl.

“What is going on here, Tilly?” he asks, keeping up the unaccustomed circling motion with his hand.

“I don’t know, sir.” One side of her mouth quirks up. “But I have a theory.”

“Go ahead then,” he says, trying to be encouraging through his impatience.

“I’ve been phasing in and out of this scenario,” she says, looking around, “but it seems like a competition to me.”

That doesn’t clarify things at all. “What is that supposed to mean?” He feels his features and mouth pull together in what Hugh sometimes calls his ‘lemon face’.

Paul looks around and realizes that there are two other teams of two in the same space as they are. Each has the same set-up in front of them: One table with bowls, bottles and vials filled with sundry fluids, powders and produce. One rack with what looks to be antique tools and implements made of wood and metal. One big chopping block with cutting boards and next to it a flickering flame topped by a metal grate.

“There used to be more teams, so I think it’s a game of elimination.” She swallows. “And now that you’re here as my partner, I think we have to play.”

“But how? By whipping things?” He’s incredulous, which at least feels a lot better than the terror closing in before Hugh found him.

“We’re making a potion,” Tilly says, almost reverent. 

“A what?” It feels like all he can do here is gape and ask questions.

“A potion,” her eyes are wide, and she puts her knife besides the cutting board, apparently done with chopping the roots. “You must have heard of the concept. Like ancient witches and rituals and pre-roto fiction.”

He’s confused, not illiterate. “Yes, cadet, I have indeed heard of the concept. I also know it is entirely fictional.” He shoots her a prickly look and immediately feels better for it, a little more like himself.

“I don’t think it’s fictional here,” she says, then adds belatedly, “sir.” Her smile is apologetic. “I mean, as far as anything here can be called fictional or real.”

The resistance against the push of his hand increases and when he looks down, the fluid in his bowl looks like it’s coagulating, turning rust-brown and sluggish. He keeps whipping. There’s this voice inside him that says it’s important, that he absolutely cannot stop before it turns green.

Tilly reaches out and holds up a yellowed scroll of … something? It looks like paper, maybe. Something out of a museum.

“This is like a recipe, instructions we have to follow, and every time we follow a step exactly, the writing vanishes and the next step appears.” Her eyes glint with an excitement that does not feel entirely warranted by the situation. “Like magic!”

She tucks her hair back behind her ear self-consciously. “Sorry,” she says, “but I was really into concepts of witchcraft for a while. I even wrote a paper on the tradition of female healers and how it was perverted to prosecute innocent women.”

She peers into his bowl, but the mixture is still an unappetizing shade of puce. 

“Anyway, from what I gathered, when you do something wrong or miss a step, you, uh,” she smiles apologetically and glances to the side, “you get incinerated.”

“What?” This must be a dream, he thinks, a strange, bizarre nightmare. 

“I’ve seen it happen,” she insists, pitch unnaturally high. “There’s still some ashes on the floor over there from earlier.”

Paul squints in the direction she indicated and, sure enough, there are tendrils of smoke rising from a small pile of ashes.

When his eyes travel back to his hands, he realizes the concoction in his bowl is changing color again, like it’s starting to bleed red and reder.

“Tilly,” he shouts instinctually, “roots.” 

She’s there with her board of finely chopped black root, her knife poised to sweep everything into the bowl, radiating tense concentration. This is important.

The viscous mass abruptly starts bubbling like lava, the bowl turning uncomfortably hot in Paul’s arms, but he keeps whipping, whipping, whipping.

There’s a big, definitive plop, and suddenly, the bowl is filled with garish green foam. 

“Now!” he barks, but Tilly’s already wielding the knife, the cut-up pieces falling onto the foam with a sizzling hiss, burning dark holes into the frothy mixture. His arm is so tired now, his knuckles cramped around the handle of the spoon, but he does not dare slow down. 

When everything is incorporated, Tilly starts counting. “Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three.” Her hand clamps over his to still his movement.

She stares at the bowl intently, her tension almost palpable. 

Every single bubble in the viscous mass pops at once, releasing a sulfuric stink. 

Tilly gasps. “Oh fuck,” she breathes out, clearly relieved, “I’m so glad that worked.”

She smooths down the instructions, and he sees new letters forming in an ornate script. Tilly’s expression darkens. 

“Um, sir,” she says, “that’s not good. That’s really not …”

“What is it, cadet?”

She swallows. “We need blood from a stab wound.”

Just as she says it, a blast of heat hits him from behind. Paul turns around and there’s only one other pair of contestants remaining. All that’s left of the second team is a steaming pile of embers.

Tilly’s lips press into a tight line, and she gets a knife and hands it to him.

He doesn’t want to stab her, but she convinces him to do it anyway. 

“When this is over, sir, we’ll still need you to bring us back home,” she says with the grating yet somewhat endearing optimism he’s come to expect from her.

He does it quickly, without warning, but with good aim. Hugh is an excellent physician, passionate about his chosen profession. Paul was bound to pick up a few things.

Tilly winces and presses the heel of her hand against the wound. “That was less painful than I thought it would be,” she says, forcing a smile through gritted teeth, “sir.”

“I stabbed you,” he says, the words wrong on his tongue, even as he tries to make them sound joking, reassuring. “You can call me Paul now.”

She huffs a pained laugh and hands him a small pipette. “So that’s all it takes. I should have let you stab me sooner.”

He cautiously fills the repository and at Tilly’s behest measures exactly thirteen drops of her blood into the bowl.

The last pair of opponents goes up in flames behind him, and he nearly drops the pipette into the bowl. Instinctively he knows that this is not a tournament you win by default.

Tilly wheezes. “That was close.” She tries to give him a smile. “Nice save, though.” Belatedly she adds, “Paul.”

Her blood makes the mixture roil again, frothing at the mouth of the bowl, threatening to spill over. Finally it quiets down, the reddish green getting muddy and then, with a sound like a deep, dark jeer, it turns transparent like water.

“Quite the anti-climax,” Paul hears himself say.

Tilly looks behind him and swallows. “I think you just jinxed it,” she says.

There’s a dark hooded figure approaching, the material of its cowl a coarse, dirty fabric. Paul tries to catch a glimpse under the hood, but he can’t, his eyes tricking him into imagining a strange, bone-colored smoke where a face should be.

The creature is screaming, he’s sure, but all he can hear is an oppressive silence that’s pushing into his ears, his nose, nudging against the seam of his mouth.

Understanding flashes through his mind, sharp like barbed wire. 

The potion isn’t just any concoction. It won’t heal or make them fly or let them see the future. It’s lethal. It’s poison.

He shivers and feels Tilly next to him do the same. The unknowable, intimidating force pounding behind his eyes, his forehead, must feed her corresponding information.

She was right. This is a competition -- and they made it to the finals. 

The hooded creature shrieks, and it pierces the silence, makes it scamper away like a living thing and almost blows out Paul’s eardrums in the process.

The screeching sounds signify nothing, but the meaning stabs its way into his mind: one of them has to drink the potion they made, and if they die, the other one wins.

It’s cruel and pointless and he won’t do it.

The hooded figure senses his resistance and starts trampling in place, making the ground shake and tremble. Fog is coming up from around the hem of the creature’s frock, and when Paul looks down, he realizes those aren’t feet stomping the ground, breaking it open, but cloven hooves. What is happening here?

“I’ll do it,” Tilly says, and gives him a brave smile. “You just go on and get the others home.”

He can’t let her win this argument, too. He can’t let her die like this. When she tries to pry the bowl from his hands, he holds on fiercely.

Incongruously, there’s that warm feeling in his chest again, a soothing presence in an absurd situation. And then he knows exactly what to do.

“Do you trust me, Sylvia?” he asks, deliberately using her first name.

“With my life,” she says, solemn as an oath.

“Both of us have to drink it at the same time.”

Her eyes widen, incomprehension painted across her face.

“It’s the only way we’ll both survive, I promise.” The conviction in his words is not his own, and all the more unassailable for it.

Paul hands her the bowl and scoops a handful of the liquid for himself before he nods at her. She obeys the signal.

As soon as the poison touches his lips, it seems to turn into acid, burning his lips, his mouth, his throat, but he keeps swallowing it down.

Through eyes squeezed in pain, he sees Tilly’s - no, Sylvia’s - face disintegrate before him, her skin giving way to flesh giving way to bone; decay and destruction eating away at her body just like they do at his.

The hooded figure screams and cackles, maniacal sounds that echo through what’s left of Paul’s skull.

And then the pain stops.

“You did good, Paul.” Hugh’s voice is like a homing beacon, guiding him to wherever he needs to go next.

“Even if you won’t see her for a while,” the voice becomes fainter as Paul feels himself solidify into a new experience within the network, “know that you saved her.”

He’s not dreaming, yet he wakes up with a start.

**Author's Note:**

> I cobbled together a prompt sheet from several different sources (hence some overlap), and today's prompts were:  
> stabbed; poisons, potions and propositions; something's off with the nation's favorite TV show; poisoned
> 
> If you allow for "the nation's favorite TV show" to be The Great British Bake-Off, I think I didn't do so bad.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed!
> 
> Like all my stories, this is part of the [LLF Comment Project](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/llfcommentproject), whose goal is to improve communication between readers and authors. This author invites:
> 
>  **Feedback** : short comments, long comments, questions, constructive criticism, "<3" as extra kudos, reader-reader interaction
> 
> [LLF Comment Builder](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/post/170952243543/now-presenting-the-llf-comment-builder-beta)  
>   
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